TRENDNet at CES 2012; Cameras, Switches, Power Line and 802.11ac

CES 2012 Las Vegas, Nevada – CES for us was not all booth babes and motherboards. We also wanted to stop by one of our long time partners TRENDNet and take a look at some of the new networking products they are going to have available to you in 2012.

The first thing that we were shown was a mockup model of TRENDNet’s new 1300 Mbps wireless devices. This will be known as 802.11ac and yes it will be a theoretical maximum of 1.3Gbps. This rather large jump in bandwidth came about due to issues (rather big ones) with pushing 802.11n to it maximum of 600Mbps. The wireless chip makers ran into heat and space issues. It takes a full six MIMO antennas to get the full 600Mbps and a minimum of four to get in at the bottom of that range. Still their problems will be our gain; at least they will be in late 2012 early 2013. Sitting next to the 1.3Gbps product place holders was the very live and available 450Mbps family from TRENDNet. We have reviewed the majority of these and can say that they are quite capable products and well worth the money that they cost. For those of you that are not interested in 450Mbps (or do not want to buy the new hardware yet0 TRENDNet still has you covered. At CES this year they also announced a new range extender. This is intended to be the easiest wireless device setup yet. To get things going all you have to do is take your phone and scan the QRC code on the box. This will open up a video that will walk you through the setup steps… like we said very easy. From the excitement of wireless we moved on to talk about PowerLine. TRENDNet will have a couple of new products out in 2012 for the PowerLine space. One of these is the smallest 500Mbps PowerLine adapter on the market. As you can see in the picture below it is quite a bit smaller and should not take up your entire wall outlet like some of the current models do. My personal favorites are the new ones with a pass-through adapter on them. We will be taking a look at some of these in more detail this year and test them in different configurations.

TRENDNet also had a display of their energy saving Green Net switches. According to TRENDNet the power savings can be as much as 70%. We are hoping that we can put this to a direct test as we have a few switches in the lab and would like to see the impact on our power bill if we changed them out.The last part of the tour covered TRENDNet’s IP Security camera line up. There are far too of these to cover here, but there will be some very cool MegaPixel IP cameras hitting the marker this year in both PoE (Power over Ethernet) and traditional powered one (both with and without wireless). We also saw TRENDNet’s latest outdoor camera. This monster is designed to survive some of the toughest weather and still provide a great image.

We are looking forward to reviewing many of these products in 2012.Here is the Suite Walk-Through.